In an effort to make my scheduler program a bit more usable (in its present form, it’s anything but — command line only, lots of restrictions on input file types), I decided to design a graphical interface for it. This is the final result. As I worked on it, I had the current student employee managers at my department sit down and click through it. It’s been through several iterations; what you see below is the product of several hours of usability testing. I eventually decided on a design based on four vertical tabs — one tab for each task that scheduling requires: defining shifts, adding/editing employee availabilities, setting global scheduling parameters, and finally building the schedule. Earlier versions of the design combined some of these tasks and used horizontal tabs. I discovered that the horizontal tab layout seemed to evoke information consumption in the mind of the user (perhaps due to the popularity of horizontal tabs in web design?), whereas the vertical tab design seems to evoke checklists and required steps. So, vertical is more intuitive.
If you have Balsamiq Mockups installed on your system, you can download the BMML files here and click through an interactive version.
